GiffGaff

Monday, 20 September 2010

Barenaked Ladies Gig and Smartphones

I was lucky enough to win tickets for a Barenaked Ladies gig at the O2 Academy in Leeds last Friday.
As I glanced around I noticed the amount of people taking photos and video with their mobile phones and it suddenly occurred to me just how much my iPhone and satnav had been used in the entire process of getting and being there.

First, was winning the tickets themselves. I was using the twitter client for the iPhone when Absolute Radio tweeted the competition question to win a pair of tickets. I tweeted back the correct answer in under a couple of minutes and I was a winner.

Then there was the SatNav with it managing to get us around the traffic on the A1 as we headed North and also directing us to the nearest car park to the venue. The result was we could leave home with very little continguency time as we did not need to use the paper map, drive blindly into traffic jams and get lost in central Leeds. Then I used Google Maps on my iPhone to get a walking route from the car park to the venue.

Once inside I was taking photos, HD video on the phone and posting some of the photos straight to Facebook.

It is only just over ten years ago, when I would be at home beating my computer keyboard around the walls because my 28k dial up modem had failed for the umpteenth time to connect to Compuserve or Daemon. Now we have broadband speed and processor power in our pockets, an always on community. They say the next billion of the world's population to be connected to the internet will be via mobile devices first.